


Essence

by scullywolf



Series: TXF: Scenes in Between [187]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Dana Scully's year-long Pregnancy, Gen, Introspection, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 00:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15425217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullywolf/pseuds/scullywolf





	Essence

Maggie Scully sighs as she cuts the ribbon holding together another bundle of balloons. If it were up to her, they would have had the shower weeks ago. This all feels so last-minute, with Dana due any day now.

But when Fox came back to life, everything else got put on hold. 

She's still not entirely sure what to make of all that. Dana called it a miracle, but even Lazarus was only dead for four days, not three months. Maggie won’t go so far as to use the word “abomination” aloud -- not like Bill Jr., in one of his worried tirades over the phone -- but there is something more than a little unsettling about the whole situation. And Dana… well, of course she doesn’t blame Dana for only seeing his inexplicable return as a blessing, as the answer to her prayers. Love has the power to blind us to even the most glaring of warning signs.

It is hard to keep her misgivings to herself, but the last thing she wants to do is risk pushing her daughter away. There is already so much Dana isn’t telling her.

She won’t tell anyone the baby’s gender. She hasn’t said if she and Fox intend to get married. She won’t commit one way or the other as to whether she is going to go back to work right away, dismissing questions about childcare plans with a handwave and “There’s still plenty of time.” 

Melissa was always the one to drift wherever life’s currents took her. Not Dana. If anything, Dana has always done the opposite, paddling determinedly against the flow to chart her own course. To see her just living in this sort of holding pattern, whether she is waiting for Fox to step up or she’s simply overwhelmed by too much bearing down on her at once, is troubling.

Which is why Maggie finally stopped waiting for Dana to make decisions about dates and times and guests and took matters into her own hands. 

“We’re having the shower at your apartment a week from Saturday,” she told her daughter. “So don’t make any other plans.”

Dana tried, preposterous though it seemed, to protest that she didn’t need a baby shower. And Maggie scoffed and told her she didn’t have to worry about making any of the arrangements, but no way was she _not_ going to have one. It wasn’t until she started trying to sort out the guest list that Maggie began to understand some of her daughter’s reluctance. 

Dana doesn’t seem to have any close girlfriends anymore. She’s lost touch with Ellen, hasn’t spoken with any of her friends from school in years, and as for work… apart from one agent in New Orleans who wasn’t able to come, Dana couldn’t think of any other women she knows or likes well enough to invite. Maggie ended up calling Mr. Skinner out of desperation, and the best he could offer was a flustered suggestion that she might invite his secretary. 

So, she did that, and asked all of the ladies from their book club to come (even though Dana hasn’t actually been to book club in months), along with a couple of her own friends from church. It wasn’t a terribly long guest list in the end, but it would have to do.

When she met Lizzy at the church picnic last weekend, it was hard to see it as anything other than divine intervention.

Lizzy Gill is new to their congregation, but she’s lived in the area for a while. She came right up and introduced herself at the picnic, and she and Maggie hit it off instantly. It turned out that she is, of all things, a nurse specializing in infant care and in-home help for new mothers. Could there have been a more perfect person for Maggie to meet, six days before Dana’s baby shower? The more they talked, the more she became convinced that Lizzy could be the answer to nearly all of her worries about whether Dana is going to have enough help after the baby is born.

She couldn’t just tell Dana outright that she should hire Lizzy, of course. Dana will take some convincing, will have to come to the decision on her own. So Maggie decided, instead, to ask Lizzy to help out at the shower. Once she’s there, Dana can see for herself what a great help it would be to have another set of capable hands around.

Not to mention it will ease Maggie’s mind to have someone _besides_ Fox keeping an eye on her daughter and new grandchild.

She looks up at the mixture of blue and pink balloons above her and sighs again. She had hoped -- wrongly, it seems -- that having the baby shower would make Dana relent and finally reveal the baby’s gender, if only to simplify the decorations and favors. No such luck. 

She pastes a smile on her face and says, as lightly as possible, “ _You know, it would be a whole lot easier for everyone if you would just tell us the sex, Dana_.”


End file.
